Batfish

Batfish is a DOS submarine simulation from 1991 distributed as shareware, meaning you copied it, tried it, and if it suited you, you sent the author fifteen dollars. That origin shows in the game for better and for worse.

The setup is deliberately unwelcoming. You have just been promoted to submarine captain and are ordered to take command without delay, which also means without training. That is not merely a line from the manual but a fairly precise description of what the game does: it puts you in front of the instruments and leaves you to work it out. The setting is the Second World War in the mid-Atlantic, you sail where you like, and the individual situations are divided into scenarios that nobody leads you between.

This is where a submarine simulation shows how it differs from other war games: most of the time nothing happens. You watch your depth and your heading, you scan the horizon and you wait. When something finally appears, you decide whether an attack is worth it or whether it is smarter to let the target pass rather than expose yourself to the counter-attack. The torpedo run takes minutes; the preparation for it takes tens of them. Anyone who will not accept that trade will be bored within a quarter of an hour.

Visually Batfish is austere: a 640x350 display, a screen full of instruments and numbers, no effects to spare. Today it is a game for the patient. The slow pace and near-total absence of explanation will put off anyone expecting software to guide them. If you like submarines and are willing to look the rules up, you will find a more serious piece of work than a fifteen-dollar shareware title has any right to be.

On oldgame.cz it runs straight in the browser, with nothing to install.